Imagine a highway with no village along the way \u2014 no traffic light in Tsarychanka, no jam at the entrance to Kobeliaky. For five years, this road in the steppes of Dnipropetrovsk region stood as a frozen construction site. Now heavy machinery is back at work, and a new lane of the future highway is rising where wasteland once stood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the N-31 Dnipro\u2013Reshetylivka highway \u2014 a project with a real chance of becoming Ukraine’s first true motorway in the European sense of the word: no at-grade intersections, with interchanges and underpasses instead of traffic lights. For government clients and the construction industry, this is an important signal: even in wartime, major infrastructure contracts don’t just exist on paper \u2014 they actually move forward on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second stage of the N-31 Dnipro\u2013Reshetylivka highway involves 30 kilometers of new roadway worth UAH 10.6 billion. Construction resumed after a pause of roughly five years: the project was frozen before it could be finished, and work has only now resumed. For comparison, this is one of the country’s most expensive road projects in recent years, and the N-31 itself is positioned to become the first full-fledged motorway \u2014 with divided carriageways and interchanges instead of intersections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of the five planned underpasses for farm machinery and local roads, four are currently being built at once. One of them \u2014 30 meters long with a 6-by-4.5-meter opening \u2014 is already in the final stage of assembly. To erect such structures, a 250-ton Liebherr crane with a 60-meter boom was brought to the site and installed \u2014 equipment you won’t see on an ordinary road repair job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, asphalt pavers are already at work on completed sections: paving, waterproofing of culverts and installation of curbstones are all underway. According to the contractor, partial opening of traffic on the second stage is planned before the end of this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What matters most here is not the mileage or even the billions, but the fact that the government client has brought to an actual construction site a project that had existed only on paper for years. For the region, it means new logistics opportunities for agricultural exports and transit, plus less traffic pressure on the streets of three towns that have long stood in the way of trucks and cars. For the construction industry, it’s an example of how a complex engineering facility \u2014 with tunnels and interchanges rather than just an asphalt strip \u2014 is being carried out in stages by contractors capable of working at this level of complexity. Such projects demand not just heavy machinery like a 250-ton crane, but experience managing several engineering hubs at once \u2014 and that’s no longer a question of money, but of a contractor’s qualifications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While some roads are still being patched after winter, others are being built from scratch \u2014 and projects like this are a reminder that reconstructing the country means not only repairing what was destroyed, but also building what never existed before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n